The Post has launched a reality-show-style contest seeking out a columnist for the paper to anoint as "America's Next Great Pundit," because "pundit" no longer means "person who expounds from knowledge and experience" but instead means "category of celebrity, like glorified hooker or bug-eater."

Here's your chance to put your opinions to the test — and win the opportunity to write a weekly column and a launching pad for your opinionating career!

Start making your case.
Use the entry form to send us a short opinion essay (400 words or less) pegged to a topic in the news and an additional paragraph (100 words or less) on yourself and why you should win. Entries will be judged on the basis of style, intelligence and freshness of argument, but not on whether Post editors agree or disagree with your point of view. Entry deadline: Oct. 21, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Then get ready for the great debate.
Beginning on or about Oct. 30, ten prospective pundits will get to compete for the title of America's Next Great Pundit, facing off in challenges that test the skills a modern pundit must possess. They'll have to write on deadline, hold their own on video and field questions from Post readers. (Contestants won't have to quit their day jobs, but they should be prepared to put in about eight hours a week for three weeks.) After each round, a panel of Post personalities will offer kudos and catcalls, and reader votes will help to determine who gets another chance at a byline and who has to shut down their laptop.

Eyes on the prize.
The ultimate winner will get the opportunity to write a weekly column that may appear in the print and/or online editions of The Washington Post, paid at a rate of $200 per column, for a total of 13 weeks and $2,600. Our Opinions lineup includes a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, regulars on the national political talk shows and some of the most influential players inside the Beltway. We'll set our promising pundit on a path to become the next byline in demand, the talking head every show wants to book, the voice that helps the country figure out what's really going on.

THE VOICE THAT HELPS THE COUNTRY FIGURE OUT WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON. Somewhere, in America, a sad blog commenter knows WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON. The Post certainly doesn't. But they're going to find that person by way of the internet, test their knowledge of WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON by putting them through challenges to find out if they have the "skills a modern pundit must possess," such as how to make videos of themselves, and then pay them $200 per column to tell us what's REALLY GOING ON. Give these people a bailout. Their continued operation is crucial to the survival of our democracy.

The magazine is currently run by Linda Johnson Rice, the daughter of founder John H. Johnson and a friend of the Obama family. Revenue is down 32% in the first half of 2009—which is worse than other magazines are faring—and Roberts says Rice has reached out to Time Warner, Viacom, and privately held firms to take it over or buy a piece of it.

So far this year, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and CEO Janet Robinson have each been granted half a million stock options, and Robinson got 650,000 options last year. And for the past 19 months, they've been paid under a plan that allows for up to $3.5 million in annual bonuses.

Trouble is, in 1991, the Times adopted rules barring its executives from getting more than 400,000 stock options and $3 million in bonuses in any given year. On Friday, the company disclosed the errors in an SEC filing and restructured Sulzberger and Robinson's packages so as to bring them in compliance with the Times' own rules.

Aside from the sheer incompetence of the Times' apparent failure to have a compliance attorney look over the compensation packages of its two most important executives, we're stunned that the board was actually contemplating giving them bonuses for 2009. The 2009 bonus for New York Times staffers was 5 cents of every dollar getting taken out of their paychecks for the good of the ailing company. The 2009 bonus for Sulzberger and Robinson? Half a million dollars more than they're even allowed to be paid.

So clearly they need a federal bailout, right?

Nikke Finke broke the story ("TOLDJA!") on Wednesday, but the paper has confirmed the rumor. (She also, incidentally, reported that Variety's chief rival the Hollywood Reporter planned to kill its print edition, a claim that the Reporter's parent company has flatly denied.)

The return to a subscriber-only site is the end of a three-year experiment in free content for Variety, which charged for web access until early 2007. But the increase in traffic (it claims about 2.5 million visitors per month) didn't drive a sufficient rise in ad revenue: Publisher Brian Gott told the Associated Press that "the more traffic you get, the lower [rates] an ad buyer can demand and it's diminishing returns."

At first that made no sense to us—more traffic might mean a CPM discount, but it's more traffic, so ad revenue should go up. But Variety's traffic bump consisted of an audience of non-Hollywood rubes out there in America that none of its insider advertisers cared about reaching, while the brand advertisers that do want to reach all those rubes probably aren't interested in doing so via an elite niche publication.

So while the Los Angeles Times and AP suggest that Variety is a coal-mine canary and situate the move within the ongoing struggle for newspapers to make money online, we think it's more of a return to the mean for a paper that needs to charge a lot of money to a very few people in order to make any money. Niche works great online, but the number of advertisers who find an audience like Variety's useful is finite, and they're already paying to advertise in the print edition.

Anyway, now instead of linking to Variety's insider breaking news, a whole bunch of blogs will just be cutting-and-pasting or rewriting it.

That $400,000 number comes straight from Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati estimating what it would've cost...had the Times paid for it in its entirety. But the bill for it was heavily footed by ProPublica, a independent non-profit "newsroom" doing investigative journalism.

The story's being published and can be read at both ProPublica and in The New York Times Magazine, and can be reprinted by anyone, anywhere beginning September 29th. Sheri Fink, the reporter, began working on the story in 2007, for four months, with her own money. ProPublica started picking up the tab, Fink stayed with the story full-time, and two years later, we have it in our hands. And what is it?

"The Deadly Choices at Memorial" details, in 13,000 words, the goings on at Memorial Medical center in New Orleans during and after Katrina's hit. Some of the major points:

• The Doctors' Perspective: Much of the story focuses around Dr. Anna Pou, who made the call to euthanize patients, resulting in her subsequent arrest and grand jury investigation. Fink interviewed Pou extensively. "Pou would later say she was trying to do the most good with a limited pool of resources. The decision that certain sicker patients should go last has its risks."
  
  
• Triage: It's a system of categorizing patients according to health in situations like this, where patients outnumber resources. Apparently, nine recognized systems of Triage exist. Not one of them were well understood by Pou and her staff. "Pou and her colleagues had little if any training in triage systems and were not guided by any particular triage protocol." Things that weren't known that are now: the number of patients, and what they went through/were injected with.
  
  
• The Patients' Perspective: Vera LeBlanc was one of the DNR patient at Lifecare, the hospital-within-a-hospital at memorial. Her son, Mark, wanted to save her when a staffer at Memorial stopped her. "Several doctors told them they couldn't leave with Vera. 'The hell we can't,' Sandra said. The couple ignored the doctors, and Vera smiled and chatted as Mark and several others picked her up and carried her onto an airboat."
  
  
• Dr. Frank Minyard, The Orleans Parish Coroner: Minyard investigated Pou. After Pou went on TV to defend herself, Minyard—a devout Catholic—met with Pou to suss out her character: "They talked for about an hour. She told him that she had been trying to alleviate pain and suffering. Given that Pou's lawyer was there, Minyard was careful not to put her on the spot with direct questions about what she had done. The conditions she described at Memorial took him back to the days he spent trapped in the courthouse after Katrina. How precious food and water had seemed. How impossible it was to sleep at night with gunshots echoing all around. Minyard told me that his feelings were less sympathetic than he let Pou know."
  
  
• Photojournalism: The Times sent photographers down there to get a photo essay on what it's like at Memorial now. And it still looks like the war zone it became. The pictures are, while unsurprising, pretty stunning.

And then there's the kicker: the shill for laws protecting health care workers in disasters from Pou. And the conversation about the lines of communication between patients and doctors, when obscured, becoming third-rail ordeals.

Much of the discussion that's going to dominate this article in the media, sadly, is that it maybe costs $400,000 to produce a piece of thorough, lengthy investigative journalism, the kind that sites like this one are going to maybe kill one bullet point at a time by summarizing them, as I did above. The fact that a non-profit had to foot the bill's only going to fan the flames even further.

What's going to happen to investigative journalism because of blogs? Important question with hard answers nobody's sure of yet (except for blogs doing their own investigative journalism, maybe). Just as important, however, are the number of readers who are going to click through to Fink's story. Bringing into question a $400,000 story's costs misses the larger point of how much the actual information contained within the story's worth to readers, and who's going to capitalize on it. Again: it took a non-profit to get a story of this size out there. Who's going to pay for the next Watergate? Or the next Torture Memos? And what kind of models are going to emerge from it?

Whoever foots the bill, if it comes out anything like this, good on 'em.

The problems facing Rolling Stone's online presence is that, well, they haven't had one. Since the late 90s, they've spread coverage of celebrities, politics, and music too thin. A destination full of Matt Taibbis, David Frickes, or celebrity gossips is one thing. Trying to do them all in the same publication is another, and it resulted in the literal and figurative sizing down of the publication.

Wenner needed to do something, so he fired an editor and brought in Steve Schwartz from Reader's Digest—yes, that Reader's Digest—as his, uh, let's see here...Chief Digital Officer. Great, well then. When Schwartz isn't commandeering the bridge of the Enterprise, he's gonna be piloting a different kind of ship. The kind that sinks before it can even set sail. Ahoy!

"I think there was the concept of, let's partner with a company that had experience in this space early on," said Schwartz, who plans to relaunch the site in January with new community and customization features. "A lot of companies spent a lot of money in trial and error mode." That said, he conceded, "It hasn't evolved nearly as much as we'd like it to."

Since Schwartz's hiring and their Unemployment for Christmas layoffs, they've made great strides, kinda capitalizing on Matt Taibbi's audience, and...that's it.

Eight months later, their Twitter's mostly an RSS feed of articles, interspersed with the occasional pieces of news. Even JetBlue's got a better Twitter. They don't have a Tumblr, their Facebook presence is mediocre, and their big high tech strategy involves one of the most reviled dinosaurs of the internet. What rhymes with BUFFERING?

Rollingstone.com will have a chance to update its music-listening technology; Wenner is determining if it will continue its partnership with Web music player Rhapsody, a joint venture with RealNetworks, after its relationship with RealNetworks ends.

Hm. Considering I can listen to whatever I want on Spotify or Pandora, amongst others, I would say that giving users the chance to interact with a widely available music player they hate isn't the most salient strategy. But this is what Wenner's spending his time "determining."

Forget the fact that Rolling Stone's losing breaking news traffic now (thanks, Brooklyn Vegan). Or that their Five Stars mean nothing anymore (thanks, Pitchfork). Or that their music analysis is being overrun (MBV), their political rockstar's still blogging for a political site that has their own writers working their own ad sales, and their movie critic is still Peter "Quotemaster" Travers.

Remember: Wenner has sites with pretty solid traffic(US Weekly), and as Maura Johnston noted, it still one of the biggest music destinations out there on brand recognition alone. But nobody cares about music enough to generate the kind of traffic the best music sites out there need to be competitive. That's not to say they couldn't become competitive, but it'd require the kind of intense online and editorial shakeup of direction and purpose they've never been able to make. And then flash back to Schwartz, who clearly doesn't understand Wenner's reluctance:

Schwartz admitted that Rollingstone.com is light on user engagement, which will be a big priority of the site relaunch. "The site that's out there right now-that whole notion of getting our audience involved in a dialogue is lost," he said.

It's pretty evident: Wenner's golden goose of ideals and ideology and influence on pop culture has to dignify—and even worse, compete with—the kinds of ragtag operations Rolling Stone once was back when Wenner first started it. Wenner's main man Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Looks like Rolling Stone was too mainstream and stodgy to get going, and for the most part, still are. As Huey Lewis once sang: it's hip to be square.

Our correspondent, who's bounced between magazines and newspapers for about five years now, is glad to have a job, obviously — and is staying anonymous in hopes of keeping it. Please don't turn the comments into a blind item guessing game.

The other night, at one of those standard-issue media cocktail parties at a bar on the Lower East Side—the type of casual post-work affair that was a dime a dozen in 2005, back when people had both work and the desire to congregate at a geographically convenient watering hole after it—I ran into Q, a former colleague of mine. We'd worked together for 18 months at the same magazine a couple of years back, after which he left to take a gig at a fashion rag and I went to work at a newspaper. I hadn't talked to him in a while, so I asked him how his job was going. "My job?" he scoffed, almost laughing at the question. "Dude, it is fucking terrible."

"Well at least you have a job!" I offered up. And one that pays pretty well. Look at the bright side!

It turns out the bright side for Q is still pretty dim. "Basically," he goes—and Q was being totally serious when he said this—"I'm 31 and at a professional dead end. And so are most people in here." We both surveyed the scene, about two dozen veteran Media Professionals posted up by the bar, with a smattering of others smoking cigarettes and chatting in enclosed circles outside. "I mean, think about it. What actual skill do I possess?" He took a gulp of beer. "I edit quips about Marc Jacobs' boyfriend for a living. 'Editing' is not really a job. Not anymore, at least. There are about a million younger, cheaper people who can do what I do, who also happen to know a thousand times more about the internet than I do. Eventually, I'll either die of boredom or get replaced. And then, what? I'll be 35. What the hell am I gonna do with the rest of my life?"

Admittedly, complaining about your well-paying job at a time when a lot of very capable people are out of work altogether won't engender any sympathy. But Q's little booze-soaked soliloquy does raise a question that seems to weigh heavily on the minds of media folk of a certain demographic these days (those over the age of, say, 27, who have already spent 5-plus years toiling in the trenches at publications that are vastly different in scope and size than when they started). Namely: Where do we go from here?

Because right now, as the Summer of 2009 gives way to fall, the answer is pretty damn unclear.

When I graduated from college several years ago, the boilerplate career arc in publishing went a little something like this: pay your dues as an editorial assistant for a couple years, biding your time until you either 1) got promoted and became an associate, or 2) jumped ship to a magazine (or newspaper, or book editing shop) where a better gig opened up. Hang in that new station for a couple years before rinsing and repeating, upwards and onwards. It was an arc that, if you played your cards right, culminated with a six-figure job you'd stick with for the rest of your professional career. (With a much higher degree of job satisfaction compared to your friends who went to law school, too.)

Of course, in the intervening years, this happened. I haven't so much as sniffed an interview for a job that would put me back on that track (does it even exist?) in over a year.

Even those who "made it" before the fall-out are bummed. A pal—a senior editor at a glossy Conde Nast fashion mag in his early 30s—summed it up like this to me over email: "Look, I have a wife. There's no way I'm gonna quit. Who in their right mind would quit right now? And hopefully, I'm not gonna be fired. But honestly, a little part of me does sort of hope that I'm next. At least that way, I'd be forced to explore other options."

His attitude makes a perverted kind of sense. "You should see this place in the mornings," he continues. "There's absolutely no energy. We're all just resigned to slogging along. At this point, I feel like every month I'm still in this job puts me a month away from being prepared to do my next one. All these young kids still wet from college complaining about the lack of media jobs—at least they're young enough to figure something else out. It's the guys like me, who've been doing this shit for a decade and don't know how to do anything else, who are fucked."

Keep in mind that this coming from a guy who gets summer Fridays and an expense account. For those unfortunate souls toiling on the internet, working (in most cases) for significantly less money and without the benefits bestowed upon hacks at brick-and-mortar joints, the disillusionment is even more palpable. "This is such a depressing grind," says one 28-year-old former magazine staffer who jumped to the web after his print publication folded. "On the web, we're operating under deadlines on a daily basis that I used to only have to deal with a few times a month, during close, when I was at a magazine. I do probably three times as much work now as I did before. In return, they don't give me health insurance." (It's not like you can readily make up the lost income by freelancing online, either. Even at the flush Daily Beast, where they make a gesture of good faith and actually pay you for contributing, anyone not named Christopher Buckley or Meghan McCain is making only $300-$500 a story—less than half of what you'd have made sending the same word count to a place that uses paper.)

Obviously, no one gets into this line of work for the money. But I did go in thinking that there'd be a way to have some fun, maintain some integrity, and still hash out a decent living. Now? You better pick one of the above, 'cause you sure as hell ain't hitting the trifecta.

At least based on anecdotal evidence, it seems as if everyone has come to this realization at the same time. People also seem to realize that this isn't just some transitional phase in which the wheat is being separated from the chaff, either; even the best talent is getting screwed. So where does that leave us? I'm not really sure. If I'd have known things were gonna shake out this way in college, I'd have probably thought twice about applying for that first magazine internship. But now, after five years, the point of no return is getting awfully close.

If I haven't shot it by already.

Image via Shawdm's Flickr.

Good luck with that. It's like we can already see the movie adaptation in our heads. Yes, there's a flickr page if you want to go look at a cute dog.

These are taken from the Newseum's exhibit of historic front pages. What's striking is the excited jingo-ism of some reports—it was Americans walking on the moon, dammit, as far as Col. McCormick's Chicago Tribune was concerned—and the clinical just-the-facts recitation of others. The New York Times' lyrical headline: "MEN WALK ON MOON; ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN; COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG." That sure captured the thrill of the moment. A subhed got so overheated that the passive voice had to be called in to cool things down: "A powdery surface is closely explored." The nearby Camden, N.J., Courier-Post did a much better job: "WE SHINE ON THE MOON."

Also fascinating are the illustrations some newspapers preferred to the grainy television stills that were available of the landing. They were comic-book style renderings that look like they belong in children's books.

In other news on July 20, 1969—police in Massachusetts were preparing charges against Ted Kennedy for leaving the scene of an accident on Chappaquiddick Island two days prior in which Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. That one only made the front page of the Columbus Evening Dispatch. He was like the Mark Sanford of his generation.

New York Times

Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

New York Daily News

Los Angeles Times

Chicago Tribune

Tampa Tribune

Pottstown (Penn.) Mercury

Camden, N.J., Courier-Post

Memphis, Tenn., Commercial Appeal

Melbourne, Fla., Today

Pittsburgh Press

Eugene Register-Guard

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Columbus Evening Dispatch

Montreal Matin

Saint John, Canada, Telegraph-Journal

Tehran, Iran, Kahyan

The Onion

David Blum is sort of a sad bumbling doctor for dying New York City weeklies. It's hard to blame him given the circumstances of the sorry industry, but his recent tenures at the Voice and the Press didn't do much to reinvigorate those much-diminished papers. Now he's thrown his hat in the ring to replace Peter Kaplan at the New York Observer, and sources say his pitch to Observer owner Jared Kushner about how he could run it on the cheap helped convince the boy-king to conduct a blood-bath earlier this month.

Blum presented Kushner with an editorial budget for the money-losing paper—we don't know the number—that was far lower than Kaplan's had been. Kushner didn't hire him (or at least hasn't yet) but was apparently impressed enough by Blum's cheaper vision to instruct interim editor Tom McGeveran to find a way to make it happen. On June 5, McGeveran laid off roughly one-third of the paper's editorial staff. We hear McGeveran negotiated to keep more jobs than Blum's plan would have, but still: Nice work, Blum!

Of course, Blum would not have been the only person in Kushner's orbit to come up with the brilliant idea of cutting costs by firing a bunch of people. And Kushner might have even been able to come up with the notion on his own. But Blum's experience overseeing the ongoing gutting of the Voice and—to a lesser extent, since there was less to gut—the Press would certainly have lent his low-budget vision credibility in the mind of a young publisher trying to figure out what the hell he'd gotten into. If David Blum says he can run this thing for that much less, why can't you?

One of Blum's tricks for running newspapers on the cheap, by the way, is working for virtually no money by Manhattan media standards. Our source says he told Kushner he'd do the job for $50,000 a year, which amounts to a nominal salary for a job of that stature. Blum can afford to forgo the salary because his wife, Terri Minsky, was the creator of Disney's Lizzie McGuire character, which presumably provides a financial cushion for the family.

Kushner confirmed via e-mail that he discussed the job with Blum but denied that Blum's budget played any role in the subsequent lay-offs: "Blum gave me one of many proposals I have gotten. His had zero to do with any decisions made. Your story is wrong, but if you don't care, then I won't either." (We do care, Jared. It's why we ask! We just don't have to believe your answer.) McGeveran and Blum declined to comment for the record.

[Full disclosure: Blum hired the wife of your blogger at the Village Voice—smart move!—where she still works.]

Fortune reports that Geffen considered buying a 19 percent stake held by Harbinger Capital, a hedge fund. (Google also took a look but passed) Geffen — or anyone, really — would be a better owner than the Sulzbergers, the kleptocratic parasites who inherited their controlling stake. (The Sulzbergers like to style themselves as guardians of the Times's vaunted journalistic values, but the current generation seems far more interested in their dwindling dividends.)

If not Geffen, then who? Probably Carlos Slim Helù, the sketchy Mexican telecom mogul who's been accumulating a stake in Times Co. shares and debt. The debt, in particular, positions him to take over the Times if its finances take a tumble. We must stop this outrage! The Times is too great a national treasure for it to land in heterosexual hands.

Everyone is being forced to take a week off without pay (when their manager tells them to, we're told) while the pay cut is 10% for everyone making more than $100,000 and apparently only on their pay above six figures. Here's a press release quoting Forbes' memo (Have the full text? Please send it our way):

Forbes confirmed today that people were laid off across all areas of the company. In making the announcement, Steve Forbes, Chairman and CEO, told employees:

"This is a very painful message. It is no secret that the economy is in a deep contraction and the media business in particular has been especially hard hit. While doing better than our peers, our business has been adversely affected."

"This has to do with both the unprecedented environment we find ourselves in today and the need for ongoing reorganization of the company in response to the enormous technological changes affecting media."

At the end of the internal memo he said, "These are serious and unfortunate steps, but we believe they are necessary and sadly unavoidable."(*)

Other measures to be taken include: suspending 401K matching contribution; salary reductions for anyone making over $100,000, amounting to 10% of the increment over $100,000. Also, employees will have a week long furlough with no pay.

Contact: Monie Begley

mbegley@forbes.com *(quotes are excerpts from internal memo)

Two sources close to FriendFinder says that Anthony Previte, FriendFinder's chief operating officer, "announced he is closing down Penthouse because it does not make any money and is in the red for production."

We called FriendFinder CEO Marc Bell to ask him about the rumor. He laughed, and then pointed out that since his company had filed with the SEC for an initial public offering to raise $460 million, if he planned to close the magazine down, he'd need to disclose that to the investing public.

Either way, folding the magazine wouldn't be a big blow to FriendFinder Networks — one source pegged losses from a recent issue at $16,000 — since the company makes most of its money off of raunchy personals websites like Adult FriendFinder, which Penthouse's publisher acquired in 2007. The bigger issue: The company's management can't seem to agree on whether to stay in the print business. On top of that, the company's facing a lawsuit from its former director of HR.

Television has been distracting people from the written word long before the Internet came along. And while the Internet has been good for reading, it's mostly encourage the consumption of short-form writing.

Print is a much better way to read long chunks of text — fewer distractions, easier on the eyes, portable from room to room, etc. — and to the extent the Kindle replicates these technological advantages, it is basically a crippled laptop.

But Granger imagines an e-reader that advances beyond the "crude" Kindle. He thinks better technology will do the trick:

... as electronic readers improve, as they add graphics and design and, eventually, color, even more people will opt for the more sustained, contemplative experiences more often. And all will be well with the world.

What he forgets: The Kindle has a built-in Web browser, though few people use it because the Web is not particularly attractive in black-and-white. If it adds color, won't people inevitably use it to read websites, and thus fewer books, just like they do on PCs? There goes Granger's theory out the window.

We suspect he has another reason for touting the Kindle, though. Hearst, the owner of Esquire is working on its own e-reader. By paying the Kindle such a backhanded compliment — right idea, wrong device — Granger is carrying water for his publisher's business interests. And not for the first time.

Hearst has invested in E Ink, a Cambridge startup whose low-power screen technology is used in both the Kindle and Hearst's planned reader. E Ink appeared on a splashy, Granger-praised Esquire cover last year. Perhaps this E Ink-stained wretch has even handled the product he envisions killing the Kindle? If so, it's too bad Granger won't tell his readers how much he loves that, too.

Armstrong, Google's top U.S. sales executive, has invested in Patch, a company which promises to develop "hyperlocal" websites focusing on news coverage specific to their communities. He's putting in money from his own fortune — money which he made through Google's lucrative IPO — but one must imagine New York Times executives view Patch as a stalking horse for the search engine.

Hence the new Times feature called The Local. Besides Patch's three towns, The Local will also cover two Brooklyn neighborhoods. It will be entertaining to hear the Times spin on why it picked Patch's turf to launch The Local. Milburn's attractive demographics? South Orange's thriving cultural scene? No, the Times is waging an old-fashioned newspaper war — on the still-unfamiliar turf of the Internet, against a Google millionaire. This will be by far more interesting than anything else that happens in Maplewood.

Everyone is competing to be more-elegiacal-than-thou in Romenesko-mourning the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver newspaper which, in the end, was only notable for being the loser in one of the last few entertaining intra-newspaper wars. Ah, for the days when newspapers killed each other, instead of being done in by intransigence in the face of technological change.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could be gone within weeks. The solution? Talking about it endlessly!

The American Society of Newspaper Editors has scrapped its 2009 convention. Good thing, as we should know by later this year if there are any newspapers left to edit. The trade group now plans to vote electronically on whether to add website editors and J-school professors to fluff up its ranks. Technology!

Worth has indefinitely delayed its relaunch and laid off editors and salespeople.

Computer Shopper has folded, because of all those people who already shopped for a computer and can now do so online.

Doubledown Media, publisher of Trader Monthly and other Wall Street-focused print titles, has filed for bankruptcy. It has legal troubles, too. No wonder its president, Randall Lane, looks so glum.

(There was absolutely no good news in the world of media. We looked!)

Hearst's e-reader will be larger than the Kindle — more like an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. And it will use technology from E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass. startup Hearst backed more than a decade ago. Hearst hopes to distribute electronic versions of its magazines and newspapers on the device, which a Hearst executive told Fortune will be out later this year.

It's like a terminal cancer patient putting faith in some herbalist's shark-bone treatment.

"The question now is, will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?" asks Fortune. Uh, no. The question is whether people will give up their iPhones and netbooks for these new readers. Cheap laptops and smartphones are an irreversible trend. Factories in Japan, China, and Korea thunder out the mass-produced parts for these devices, which make their economics compelling. And a PC has the virtue of not being designed by a publisher more interested in protecting an old way of doing a business than serving readers.

Hearst has exercised its E Ink fetish before, when Esquire used it for an expensive, pointless cover. But the fact that Hearst owns a stake in E Ink is the silliest possible reason to champion the technology. Economists would call that a sunk cost: It's money already spent.

Newspaper and magazine publishers seem desperate to find some new trick to preserve the scarcity on which they used to profit. In a world overflowing with media, that is impossible. And editors and publishers are not clever technological tricksters. The E Ink reader will start out black-and-white. Wait, aren't the glossy photos and gorgeous layouts why we pick up magazine sin the first place?

What they ought to be doing is fixing their websites: Adding comments everywhere, publicly displaying the comments and pageviews stories garner, and — crucially — adjusting the story mix in light of that information. It's unlikely to happen. The makers of magazines are so used to dreaming up story ideas in their skyscraper aeries. It will never occur to them that their readers might actually be smarter than they are.

Smart enough, at any rate, not to buy a gadget designed by a magazine guy.

(Image via Gizmodo)

Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. If Larry and Sergey plan to share anything more than links with the newspapers whose headlines it displays in Google News, they haven't signaled their intentions.

Good on them! If the newspapers had ever been even a tenth as cynical, opportunistic, and clever about exploiting their product and finding new advertisers as Google has, they wouldn't be in this mess. Instead of condemning Google of "stealing" their content, newspapers should be grateful that someone's making a pie — of which they can now ask for their fair share.

For example: A search for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on Google contains an ad for a DVD of Bartz's speeches. Can you imagine a newspaper salesforce thinking to solicit that ad, let alone running it in a timely fashion? There's a host of potential advertisers like that whom the newspaper industry has never tapped.

We're no doubt going to hear a lot of newspaper grandees groan that, like Apple in the music industry, Google will capture most of the profits from the online sale of their product. Did it ever occur to them that Apple might be reaping more of those profits because consumers think the portable convenience of the iPod and the one-click simplicity of iTunes have more value than the time-filling music itself?

Unlike the record industry, though, which for a good couple of decades had an enormously successful distribution medium in the CD, the newspapers have never come up with an electronic version of the news that is at once profitable for them and popular with consumers. Their websites are at once too large to shut down and too small to sustain them. The only newspapers seriously considering pay-to-read schemes are also-ran operations like Newsday. The right answer is embracing new sources of traffic (and hence revenue) like Google News — not shutting them off.

A few publishers understand this — generally outcasts like Dean Singleton, who's widely hated by his employees for cutting costs, and who recently killed one of his own by having his scrappy Denver Post outlast the Rocky Mountain News, which printed its final edition today. "The Internet world is a very competitive world," Singleton told the Times. "We don't have to let them take our content. We let them do so because it drives traffic." He's right: If the newspapers withdraw their headlines from Google News, scrappy Internet publications will gleefully replace them. To newspaper publishers who grew up with virtual local monopolies, this thought just doesn't occur.

Publishers should be rejoicing that Google is trying to make money off their headlines. At least someone is.